Need For Speed: The Run has a great idea in mixing elements of street racing with cross-country segments. It all but guarantees you’ll have a great variety of courses to race on, and The Run definitely delivers this. Players take the role of Jack, an expert in illegal races who is competing in the latest high-stakes race in order to repay the mob and get them off his back. It’s the sort of game idea you want to see succeed, because it has so much potential. Sadly, a lack of ambition and polish in many aspects drag things down. From start to finish, it’s clear the developers made this as ’safe’ a game as possible that takes very few risks and tries nothing particularly noteworthy. The result is a game that can be described as ’okay’, but okay is hardly a ringing endorsement when The Run released around the same time as many of this season’s top titles.
The story mode consists of the titular Run, an illegal race going from city to city, valley to valley, coast to coast; from California to New York. You start with Jack trying to escape from gangsters that are out to kill him for some outstanding debts, and a series of Quick Time Events lead him to his first car. Only then does actual driving action begin, though it’s just a short section to get you familiar with how your car works. After a few more cutscenes that fail to tell a particularly engaging story, you finally get to the race. What follows is a roughly two to four hour trek through all sorts of locations, though it’s divided into several tiny segments. Any given leg of the race is only a few minutes long, and has static goals such as passing X number of cars before you reach the ’finish line’ for that area, or making it to a series of checkpoints in time. A few more QTE segments come up, rounding out the story mode.
Unfortunately, this design robs the story mode of any feel of truly being a race. It’s very binary in that you either succeed at the segment’s goals or you do not, and there is not much room for personal excellence. If part of the race calls upon you to pass eight racers within five miles, understand that you must pass eight of them and there will be exactly eight to pass in that segment; you can’t do supremely well to pass a ninth or tenth racer, and passing just seven is not acceptable. Going off the track is generally not allowed either, as cutting corners even in places where it makes perfect sense to do so often forces you to spend a retry/rewind point that takes you back to your last checkpoint (usually about five seconds to a minute ago). It’s strange, frustrating, and feels very out of place in a wild race that is presented as having few or no rules. Put simply, even with unlockable challenge stages to extend it, the single-player experience is only passable at best.
While the race is frustrating and QTE segments add little to the experience, the sheer variety of locations deserves praise. Every city you visit looks meaningfully different, and each piece of the cross-country segments features a unique idea. Snowy mountains, rural plains, an area swept up in a dust storm, all of these and more are explored and while there are some technical gaffes they mostly look great. The Run does an amazing job of giving the player lots of fresh places to drive through, and any developers stuck in ’the entire world is gray or brown’ mode ought to look at this game just to see how varied and beautiful a virtual world can be.
